Cooling water to immensely cut transportation costs

Client: Oil and gas exploration company
Location: Oklahoma, USA
Sector: Oil and gas

Overview

The challenge

High-temperature backflow water was too hot for temporary pipelines, requiring costly truck transport.

The solution

Aggreko cooled the water to a safe temperature for transfer through the temporary pipelines.

The impact

Eliminating 15 daily truckloads reduced transportation costs and helped keep the project on schedule.

200-280°Fbackflow water temperature

585 gallonsof water pumping per minute

15 trucksper day needed to move this water

Working together

Cooling boiling water to transfer through temporary pipelines.

During fracking, temporary high-density polyethylene pipelines are used to transport water from the drilling site out of the way to temporary holding sites. But the deeper the drilling points reach, the hotter water temperatures will get, resulting in problems transporting this water through the temporary pipes.

One US oil and gas exploration company was drilling down to about a 10,000 ft. depth point where the water backflow produced reached nearly 600 gallons a minute. The water at these depths would reach approximately 280°F, which at that temperature was too hot for the pumps and the piping to work properly.

To keep on top of the output, the customer was filling up a new truck every 30 minutes and driving the water to a sister site 12 miles away.

This was a logistical nightmare—but unless we could more than halve the heat of the water to run it through their pipes, the customer would have to keep using this costly and cumbersome method.

Cooling towers for summer months, fin fans for the winter.

For the winter months, our experts determined the problem could be solved with the careful use of fin fans to cool the water down. The real trouble was in the summer.

For the hotter months, we set up a separate water tank, which connected to our cooling towers and heat exchangers. A flow of 585 gallons per minute moved from the well and into the tank, where we brought the temperature down to just 86°F—a perfect temperature for running through the pipes.

The entire setup was powered by two of our 300 kW generators, along with the necessary cabling and distribution equipment for connection. Additionally, we had our certified technicians onsite and readily available if the customer needed additional support—a perfect setup to ensure there were no delays in drilling.

A faster, more cost-efficient system.

With the water cool enough to run through the pumps and pipes, there was no more need to resort to expensive trucks to get water away from the injection site. Eliminating the need for trucking and time spent getting the water loaded and to the sister site allowed the customer to better manage time and keep the project on track.

More importantly, the customer had a seamless, hassle-free solution that ran up no extra expense or bottlenecks, sharply reducing their overall costs.

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